Earning My Ears At The Playboy Mansion 11/11/09

There wasn’t a moment in my childhood when I dreamt of being a princess.

Nor did I sit and daydream about the day I would walk down the aisle in a meringue with the man of my dreams. I didn’t want to be a beauty queen or a ballerina.

What I wanted to be, more than anything when I grew up, was a Bunny Girl.

I had always been keen to meet Hugh Hefner, the man behind these iconic creations and who was something of a hero to me on the sexual wasteland of my youth.

And now, living in Los Angeles, and the publication of my Hefner’s
6-volume, illustrated autobiography, I was finally going to get my chance.

Maybe it was not too late to fulfil my Bunny aspirations.

The Playboy Bunnies were waitresses at the Playboy Clubs between 1960 and 1988. A direct spin-off of the magazine of the same name, Hefner established the clubs and bunnies after he founded the men’s magazine Playboy in 1953, with just $8000. To earn their floppy ears, prospective bunnies had to undergo intense audition procedures and, if successful, adhere to strict guidelines.

They had to be able to identify 143 brands of liquor and know how to garnish 20 cocktail variations. They were not allowed to mingle with customers and had to perfect certain manoeuvres, including the “Bunny Dip”.

This required a Bunny to lean gracefully backwards while bending at the knees, with the left knee lifted and tucked behind the right leg. This allowed her to serve drinks, while keeping her low-cut costume in place.

Yes, the costume. Oh, the wonderful costume. That was what I really wanted. A pair of ears. A bow tie. And a pom pom on my arse.

I kid you not. If you were a young person growing up in Wales in the Sixties, your fantasies began and ended with dressing up as a druid and/or winning the “Chair” (heaven forbid; talk about crap prizes) for having written incomprehensible verses for the National Eisteddfod - and at that time, only men had been the recipients, anyway. So what were we girls left with?

Well, dressing up in black hats and pinafores every St David’s Day on March 1st, with a leek pinned to our chests, belting out Calon Lan in the school hall. The life of a Bunny seemed a world of sophistication and freedom a long way away.

The not so glamorous life of the Bunny Girls was exposed by the feminist writer Gloria Steinem in 1983, and also, most recently, by ex-girlfriend Izabella St James in her book Bunny Tales – Behind Closed Doors at the Playboy Mansion. Hefner has always had girls installed at his home, but St James writes as if she was little more than a slave, pandering to an old man with outdated sexual attitudes and sleeping with up to four girls a night – also adding that he’s not that hot a lover anyway.

Like others, though, she took the deal and writes that upon picking up the $1000 from Hef’s bedroom every morning (the time when he would discuss their failings), girls also received a $10,000 down payment on a car, and all the plastic surgery they wanted. Apparently, breast augmentation is the first and most urgent of Hef’s requirements in his girls and costs him over $70,000 a year.

It’s not the life that every woman would want, but one that St James, like many others, was quick enough to buy into, in her own quest for fame and fortune. And despite the bad press ex-girlfriends continue to heap upon their sugar daddy (but come on – nobody held a gun to their heads), there is a lot more to the story.

With the publication of Hugh Hefner’s 6-part autobiography on November 8th (at 6 volumes and over 3500 pages, it begins with childhood and covers Playboy’s first 25 years), a much fuller picture of this extraordinary man’s life emerges.

Artist, writer, dancer, businessman, husband, father, film buff, eternal romantic – it is a story of someone who undoubtedly changed the world, for better or worse, depending on your viewpoint.

For me, it is undoubtedly for the better. There is nothing we take for granted more than our freedom, and in particular where sexuality is concerned. In 1960, Penguin Books, which had published DH Lawrence’s novel Lady Chatterley’s Lover, was prosecuted under the Obscene Publications Act; seven years earlier, on the other side of the pond, Hugh Hefner was refused the special rate postal permit to transport Playboy which, on the cover of its first edition, featured Marilyn Monroe.

In 1945, Esquire had also nearly lost its permit for the same reason – the publication of nude shots of women – and became more conservative as a result – but Hefner took his case through the Washington courts, and won.

Hefner reminds me a great deal of Lawrence, who is my literary hero. Both men stood up for the free expression of sexuality at a time when it was not only unfashionable to do so, but illegal.

Far from being a slap in the face to feminism, both men, it seemed to me, allowed women to celebrate their sexuality in the same way that men always had. In Playboy, that sexuality went hand in hand with other aspects of a traditionally male lifestyle – drinking, smoking, having fun – and far from being exploited, women were finally competing on the same terms as the men who had been doing the exploiting.

The Playboy Mansion is just up the road from me in central Los Angeles. Home to dozens of charity events (Hefner raises a lot, for many different charities), it is a Tudor style house, homely rather than ostentatious, and set in beautifully kept grounds that also house a waterfall and a zoo. Hefner is a big animal lover, and visitors must take heed of the sign on the road leading in, warning “Playmates at play”.

I don’t see any playmates, but know they are there. The new lot. Holly Madison, Kendra Wilkinson and Bridget Marquardt departed in October 2008, after starring in the TV series The Girls Next Door, about life for Hefner’s girlfriends living at the mansion.

In their place, Hefner has installed his new “Number One” girlfriend, 22 year old Crystal Harris, and identical 19 year old twin models, Karissa and Kristina Shannon, who are starring in the new series.

I know the twins are lurking somewhere, when a lady approaches the PR and whispers that the twins require assistance in the drawing room. Maybe they need help with pumpkin carving practice, a traditional Mansion Halloween activity that will feature in the series and about which Crystal wrote about on her blog. There are worse things women have been asked to do.

The house surprises me. St James’s description of a decrepit time-warp, old, stale, and with a stench of wee from Archie the house dog allegedly relieving himself on the curtains, isn’t what I find.

There is exquisitely calved wood in the hallway and up the staircase; stained glass looking out onto the magnificent grounds; and the tiniest dog that greets me like . . . Well, a new Playmate, though I may be jumping the gun.

I am placed in the library, next to the enormous viewing room where, on different nights of the week, Hefner holds film nights for his celebrity friends, complete with introduction and well-researched notes, which he delivers.

There are dozens of film books lining the shelves; the six-volume autobiography sits on a rather fine coffee table; the adjoining bathroom is a shiny black palace containing Listerine, aspirin and stomach soothing liquids (clearly, entertaining ladies can take its toll physically).

Hefner appears, in his trademark red smoking jacket and looks remarkably youthful for his 83 years. He is still undoubtedly good looking, and the years have given him a rugged charm.

He moves easily to the sofa, although it is clear that his hearing isn’t great, when he notes my accent and tells me that his “best girl”, Crystal, was conceived in England but born in Arizona, even though I have stressed I am from Wales.

But he is keen to put me at my ease, and he is gracious when I express my pleasure at meeting him. Even so, I suspect that my British connections won’t be enough to get my suitcase through the door. So, what qualities does he look for in women?

“Smart, sincere, funny . . . “ So far, so good. I feel I am several steps closer to gaining my ears. “What I look for by and large is somebody I’m physically attracted to, who has a sense of humour, common interests.”

Alas, judging by the photographs of girls dotted around, I can see, as Izabella St James said, that physical attraction also involves a whacking great pair of knockers, and no Bunny Dip in the world is going to give me those. In fact, I think I would probably take up about $68,000 worth of the 70 Hefner allegedly sets aside for these ops.

It is instantly clear that Hefner is used to giving interviews and that he is not going to be giving anything away that he doesn’t want you to know. His answers are articulate – some a little too well-honed, considered, and unlikely to stray into unchartered territory.

But when he laughs – which he frequently does – it is the most delightful guffaw, like a boy in cahoots with another behind the bike-shed, plotting, and taking delight in the misdemeanour they are about to commit.

I quickly discover that it is not overt sexuality that really turns Hefner on; it is love, a subject that he warms to with a longing in his voice that has the air of a life fulfilled rather than one of regret. Growing up during the Great Depression, his dreams and fantasies were fuelled by pop culture and the movies, and they were a world away from his Puritan home life.

“My younger brother and I were raised in a home in Chicago, with no real affection; we knew we were loved, but there was no display of affection. I think that my quest for romantic love and the adventure of romantic love was filling the space that was left because I didn’t get the affection when I was young.”

It did not, however, affect his own ability to show affection, much of which has been heavily documented in stories about his many conquests over many years. “I was very demonstrative, because I’d seen it in the movies. Most of us learned, in that time frame, how to be cool, sophisticated, whatever, from the films.”

The little boy looking for love is a far remove from the image of the playboy with a roving eye, so has he been engaged in a lifelong pursuit of female affection because he didn’t get it from his mother?

“I think so, yes. What I’m really saying is that my own conscious and unconscious, my own definition of love, has been an essentially romantic perception of love . . . I am romantically driven. If I’m not in love, if I don’t have a primary relationship, at minimum, I don’t really feel fulfilled or happy, no matter what else is going on. I’m a big fan of Dennis Potter, and in Pennies from Heaven – I’m paraphrasing – he says somewhere there must be a world where the words to the songs are true; and I think that my life has been a quest for – that impossible quest – for that perfect world of those old-fashioned songs.”

He nevertheless recognises that it is an illusion, and romantic love an invention and not part of nature: “But I’ve managed to dream impossible dreams and make most of them come true beyond anything I could possibly have imagined.”

There is still disbelief and incredulity in his voice.

The dreams that are rooted so firmly in childhood fantasies feature most heavily in volume one of the autobiography, the first half of which is Hefner’s favourite part of the work.

It reveals him to be an exceptional artist, heavily influenced by the likes of Flash Gordon: the male protector against bizarre interplanetary forces; heroes and monsters, fighting in an exclusively male world.

It is a childhood that he still feels very much connected to, and when he talks about it, he does so with such passion, the years fall away from his face and you can see the little boy, still taking delight in, and living again, those youthful pleasures and touching base with his young self.

“I always felt, from a very early age, that I was a one-eyed man in a blind world. I see things in terms of human behaviour and the way of things that most people seem to miss. Most people live religious myths, superstitions, that confuse the way they live their lives, and I have always been fascinated with, from a very early age, why we hurt each other the way we do, and a lot of it has to do with sex.”

This fascination led him to major in psychology in the University of Illinois, where, as a post-graduate, he wrote a paper on sexual behaviour and US law. While he believes that the State has a place in legislating for sexuality on some issues – to protect children, for instance - its interference in the private activities of individuals mystified him, as it continues to do. Religion, he says, is largely to blame.

“The idea that the only purpose of sex is procreation is a ridiculous view. Think about the morality of that – no population control, when one of the major problems we have on this planet is the need for population control.”

Despite the sexual revolution, in which he played so significant a part, does he believe that with the rise of Right wing fundamentalism, that the US is as sexually repressed as ever?

“I don’t think we’re more sexually repressed, but I think we’re very screwed up. This is a very strange country, and in a curious way it’s become more apparent with the election of Obama. I’m a big fan and a supporter of Obama, but him becoming President has brought out from under the rocks this really dark, Right wing part of America. Once religion got really actively involved in politics in 1980, with Ronald Reagan, we were on our way down a very slippery slope. And what we had with Bush was really bizarre, because he was anti-science, he was anti-education, and his Presidency was based on a Right wing, religious view – very scary. Those views are scary if they’re in a Muslim country, they’re scary if they’re here.”

Hefner is an erudite man, with an innate sense of fairness and would have made a great lawyer – for the defence; the logic he applies to all subjects, which he expresses with great precision, makes it hard to disagree with his views, but there is nothing didactic about him; he would have made an effective politician. Politics, however, never attracted him – “not for a moment”. But that hasn’t stopped the State fearing him as a political animal with influence.

“The real problems I had, back in the Sixties and Seventies, had less to do with naked women than the fact I was trying to change the world. I had provided money to de-criminalise marijuana and they came up with a bogus drugs case that resulted in my secretary committing suicide, when they were trying to get something on me.”

Although never into drugs himself, he still believes they should be legalised and abhors a system that puts people in prison for taking them.

“You have to solve these problems in a social/medical way. What is the rational justification for these laws? Moral views based on what. Not on reason. These laws are truly hurtful to society. Prohibition gave us organised crime. Our laws in terms of drugs not only put all kinds of people who have drugs problems in prison, but in the process completely corrupt entire countries.”

He is also fearful of the wider international problems he sees his country at the forefront of creating, in particular since the Second World War.

“The last moral war America had to do with was World War II. The rest were for all the wrong reasons. World War II had two sides to it, and the same thing goes for Israel and Palestine. They should be solved amicably. You can’t force the rest of the world to live by your particular values - because some of your values are a little suspect. A lot of it has to do with oil – economic considerations. You have to be very suspicious of what really lies behind some political actions.”

It strikes me that Hefner is one of the most moral men I have ever met. Not hurting people, whether that be socially, politically or sexually, is always at the top of his agenda, and his sense of doing the right thing is clearly something that has influenced him both personally and professionally from childhood.

He was, for example, desperately hurt when his first wife was unfaithful to him when he was in the army for two years and remained faithful to her. Likewise, his second wife. He also says that he and his various girlfriends are faithful to one another – just not within a monogamous relationship.

How that apparent contradiction and sense of morality sits alongside his role as the founder of Playboy and its various spin-off enterprises is something that many might question, but the attacks still leave him as confused as they did when first aired.

“I was blindsided by it; I couldn’t make any sense out of it because as far as I was concerned, the women’s movement was part of something larger, which was the sexual revolution, and the major beneficiaries of the sexual revolution were women. It was women who were historically held in bondage by church and state.”

He began Playboy with funds raised by putting his furniture in hock; his mother also gave him $1000. While she disapproved of the venture, she said that she believed in her son, and of course her risk reaped huge financial dividends. His father even went on to work as an accountant in the organisation, and then treasurer. What gave Hefner the self-belief that the magazine would work?

“I think it was by and large a eureka moment that came immediately, but at the same time, in retrospect, I think I was in preparation for it all my life – doing cartoons, creating stories and doing mini-publishing. I did my first penny newspaper when I was nine years old. I remember a specific day when I stood on the Michigan Avenue Bridge and looked out at the lake and thought: Is this all there is to my life? I was working as a circulation manager for a children’s magazine and immediately I began making plans for this men’s magazine – what it seemed to me Esquire had been in the Thirties and then stopped.”

The autobiography is packed with fascinating material from the magazine’s first 25 years. All the great American writers are there – John Cheever, John Updike, Saul Bellow – and the six volumes are a slice of international history like no other.

There is a fascinating interview with Martin Luther King in 1965, at a time when the notion of a black President was almost laughable. There are hilarious adverts, in particular items featured in The Men’s Shop – a lampshade that is really a TV antenna, for instance. There are regular Drinks Quizzes and, of course, women: all of them what I would call classy broads.

“If you’re a man between the ages of 18 and 80,” the first issue reads, “Playboy is meant for you.” It points out that it is not a family magazine and comes with a warning: “If you’re somebody’s sister, wife or mother-in-law and picked us up by mistake, please pass us along to the men in your life and get back to your Ladies Home Companion.”

You can see why the feminists didn’t like it, but Hefner insists he wrote the introduction with his tongue firmly in his cheek. “We like our apartment,” it went on, “and inviting in a female acquaintance for a quiet discussion on Picasso, Nietzsche, jazz, sex”.

It was, it claimed, to be “a diversion from the anxieties of the Atomic Age.” It was certainly that.

Today, with the proliferation of internet porn, the Playboy empire does not appear to be as powerful or influential as it once was, and there have been whisperings of financial problems. But, says Hefner, “the brand itself has never been more popular.”

Far from finding a man poring over a salacious empire of exploitation, I left the Playboy mansion with a strong sense of the importance of Hefner not only within the sexual history of the world, but in history as a whole, a Renaissance man in the fullest sense of the word – and the brilliant autobiography confirms this.

It is the best history book the 21st century has so far produced, and the limited edition of 1500 copies also comes with a 7cm x 7cm piece of the man’s infamous silk pyjamas.

I realise, upon leaving, that it’s as close to them as I’m going to get. I will never be a Playmate – the “wholesome girl next door” that Hefner says is the number one criterion, and I didn’t earn my ears – or my breasts. And I’m a really crap pumpkin carver.

But that’s okay. I’ve been a girl at the Playboy Mansion, and that has to beat dressing up in Welsh national dress anyday.

Shrinking Violence 11/4/09

You don’t hear any references to midgets for years, and then three come along together.

I was re-watching Martin McDonagh’s brilliant In Bruges, which is one of my favourite films of all time, and which features a midget - Canadian actor Jordan Prentice – who gives rise to some of the funniest quotes from hit-man Ray (Colin Farrell).

Then I was reading American comedian Chelsea Handler’s book, My Horizontal Life, in which she describes the various men she has been to bed with – one of whom happened to be a midget.

And then, this week, I was trying to dodge the traffic to get to the Beverly Centre on La Cienega, and a motorist leaned out of his window and yelled: “Idiot midget!”

At first I was most offended by the “idiot” part of the abuse. Cars in Los Angeles are allowed to run anyone down at anytime, because although the white man on the sign is technically telling pedestrians to cross, motorists can ignore it at their leisure.

When four lanes and about half a dozen feeder roads choose to ignore it at the same time, making it to your destination without losing a limb becomes something of an achievement.

So I was not being an idiot. I was doing what the little white man was telling me to do (ie cross the road), and it was hardly my fault if the people in the cars chose to ignore the possibility that someone might wish to take up his offer.

Then the “midget” bit started to bother me. I haven’t been called a midget since my schooldays. When I was in my early teens, Bridget the Midget was in the charts, which was a disaster for small people everywhere.

I had survived my primary schooldays being called Titch, after the children’s ventriloquist show, Titch and Quackers (a small boy and his pet duck – how we laughed), and also Short Arse; but Bridget stuck with a few people, most notably Robin Davies.

I met him a couple of years ago and reprimanded him for ruining my youth, but, quelle surprise, he had no recollection of it.

In one fell swoop, “midget” brought back those painful years, and I felt quite tearful. Also, I am not a midget; I am five feet tall, which to a midget is a giant.

But I have discovered that LA is a very size-ist place – although not where men are concerned.

If you are a man with money and/or success, it doesn’t matter if you are two feet or ten feet tall; but all the women seem to be over six feet, which is just as well, given the gargantuan breasts they have to carry around.

I recently met Verne Troyer, the famous American actor (actually, that’s four recent midget connections – weird!) who appeared in the UK’s I’m a Celebrity . . . Get Me Out of Here! last year.

I was introduced to him by La Toya Jackson, to whom I had given up my seat on an Air New Zealand flight to LA. Verne is just two feet eight, and when I excitedly approached to introduce myself, he shrank to about 12 inches in terror, as if in an effort to disappear altogether at this strange giant’s advances.

Nobody, I suspect, calls Verne an idiot midget when he attempts to cross a road; but then maybe he has tall people to carry him.

As a small woman, however, I stand out as a bit of a freak – or so I keep being told, albeit couched in less offensive terms. I have been called “unique”, “interesting”, “sweet”, “different”, and when I went looking for a new apartment, all the potential landlords expressed worry over cupboard height and recommended stores where I might be able to purchase a set of steps to help me reach the top shelves.

I have been told that I can capitalise on this uniqueness, though so far I am finding it hard to see precisely how. I suppose I could put myself forward in Hollywood to play Verne’s tall girlfriend, but then from everything I’ve seen, he has a preference for women over six feet, too.

With Christmas coming up, there must be shortage of elves somewhere (unless Verne’s mates have already nabbed all the best jobs); and if Stephen Spielberg ever decides to do ET II, with the actor inside the prosthetics no longer with us I might be able to audition for that – although Verne will probably nab that one for himself.

No, unless they are planning on making Gulliver’s Travels starring Welsh midgets invading Lilliputia, it seems that I am going to have to be content to live my LA life out on a limb – or separated from it, if I keep encountering the drivers like the ones on La Cienega.

Idiot giants.

Exorcising the Exercises 10/21/09

Seven months after joining the Beverly Hills branch of Sports Club LA, I am no nearer to finding a group sport that I enjoy.

My daily workouts are undoubtedly enhanced and encouraged by seeing the exquisite form of Victoria Beckham on a nearby treadmill, and even more so last week when Mr Beckham also turned up in the gym, a sight that induced in me so severe a case of Beckhamitis, I swear I had two birthdays in the time it took the paramedics to bring me round.

Exercising by myself enables me to go at my own pace, and I have discovered that if I exercise to music rather than watching marathons of Law and Order or NCIS, I go a lot faster on the treadmill.

Musicals are particularly effective, and this week alone I have exercised my way out of prison (Les Miserables), shot my twin brother (Blood Brothers), and had plastic surgery to enable me to sing Tits and Ass with sufficient verve (A Chorus Line).

I gave Phantom of the Opera a miss because Sir Andrew Lloyd Webber was very offhand with me at Simon Cowell’s 50th birthday party. I can be mean like that.

But put me in a class, and all my concentration and good intentions go to pieces.

First, I tried boxing, because I have always been a huge fan of the sport. As a child, my brother and I were allowed to watch Mohammed Ali’s fights, which always began at 8pm – but only if we first went to bed at six and slept for two hours. Punching somebody’s lights out took on metaphorical as well as real significance in our household, and to this day I love watching boxing.

Before LA, I had tried it just once before, in the St David’s gym in Cardiff, where, in a class of young men, I felt I had to compete - despite being a 40-something woman.

I managed to push the enormous punch-bag on its stand more quickly to the other end of the room than they did (I am, and have always been, extremely competitive), but did in my knee in the process and couldn’t exercise again for six weeks.

My first and only boxing class in LA ended in similar disaster. When I entered the empty gym, I just wasn’t prepared for the rotating mechanical punch-bags zipping their way round as I waited in line for the class to start. Zap! The first one arrived and smacked me square on the gob.

After that, I found the class a little stressful. “I give you ten seconds, I give you nine seconds, I give you eight seconds . . . “ On and on and on. The teacher counted every damned second of the hour-long class to every single movement we made – all accompanied by ear-splitting disco music.

Having enquired at reception as to what might be a quieter, less dangerous class, I decided to try Anusara Yoga. It was very, very calming.

At the start, the teacher said she had been “talking” to a 16 month old child, with whom she had been sharing the youngster’s enthusiasm of the new world the little girl was experiencing.

Enthusiasm. That was the “intention” she asked us to focus upon over the next 75 minutes; or, failing that, any other intention (mine was ensuring that I record the last episode of Sunday’s My Antonio, a show for which I have immense enthusiasm, so I felt I was killing two – actually, I don’t think killing is a Yogic term, so let’s say I was anaesthetising two – birds/intentions with one stone).

It was all going well up until the Cobra position, lying on our stomachs with our chests stretched upwards and our backs in an arc. Then we had to move into an arch, passing a child/cat/dog/antelope position (I was losing concentration, if I’m being honest), with our backs in the air.

It was an exercise I had done in the past, when I taught myself a bit of yoga and needed to release trapped gas. I tell you: the class was the entire wind section of the LA Philharmonic.

If the point of yoga was to co-ordinate breathing with movement, I couldn’t see that having to hold my breath for the next five minutes to avoid the smell was going to do me any good at all.

I tried Power Yoga instead, in the hope that the speed of the thing might at least circulate any bad odours that might manage to permeate the room. This time I lasted just half an hour, when the teacher encouraged the class to make noises while they inhaled and exhaled – “like sea-shells”.

Somehow I found myself among the tidal wave contingent and just wanted to tell them all to shut the hell up.

My concentration also wasn’t helped by the teacher again telling us to focus on any “intention” we liked – world hunger, if we so wanted: something that, he added, was always on his mind . . . starving people the world over . . . and yet nothing was ever done about it . . .

Look, mate: I know, but you’ve just said that this is MY time, MY space, and MY body to do with what I like with MY intention. Now you’ve gone and blown My Antonio right out of my psyche. I rolled up my mat and skulked out.

I have decided that I am just not a group exercise sort of person and am therefore returning to the treadmill and the stepper with just my ear-phones and the TV on the machine for company. And Dave and Vic, of course. Now there’s a couple you won’t hear breaking wind in public.

How To Kill A Pumpkin In 3000 Easy Moves 10/17/09

Before I moved to LA, I could think of no circumstances in which it would be necessary for me to purchase a Pumpkin Carving Kit.

But then before I moved to LA, I could think of no situation in adulthood (given that I don’t have kids) that would ever require me to go out and buy a pumpkin.

Pumpkins, like dolls, are something you grow out of. Every Halloween during my childhood, days would be spent hollowing out pumpkins with . . . Well, what did they use before Pumpkin Carving Kits came into being? Chisels, I suspect . . . and shopping for apples in readiness to stand around in the cold, choking to death in a bucket of water for an apple that you could just as easily have taken from the fruit bowl.

The work didn’t stop once you had removed the innards, either. Next, you had to make a mouth and two triangles for eyes (by which time you had usually made such a mess of it, you had to go out and buy another pumpkin).

On the one occasion my mother decided not to waste the insides of the beast and make pumpkin soup (not great – and she was an amazing cook; seriously bad product), I think we all decided that enough was enough. Too much work. Too old.

If, as Shirley Conran said, life was too short to stuff a mushroom, it was certainly too short to hollow out a pumpkin.

But this week, I found myself at a local store, Crate and Barrel, ardently trying to work out which tool did what in the Pumpkin Carving Kit (as I see it, you can prepare the thing in just marginally less time than it would take you to build a house) and contemplating Halloween.

It’s difficult to escape it here. My neighbour has a 20-foot shroud in her garden, complete with an iron chain of Alcatraz proportions, and topped with an all too realistic skull.

On the 1st of October, everyone put pumpkins out – on their lawns, in their windows, on their steps. They are there for any closet pumpkin kleptomaniac to steal at any time, yet nobody touches them; they have an air of the Holy relic about them, and people pass the best displays with reverent awe, almost bowing at the altar of pumpkin-ness they see before them.

For me, it is just an excuse to buy another appliance that I will use once and then put in a drawer and forget about.

Crate and Barrel is my second favourite kitchen/furniture store in Beverly Hills, surpassed only by Pottery Barn (I want to roll up in one of their bath towels and hibernate) and, for kitchen equipment alone, Williams Sonoma.

So regular are my appearances in Williams Sonoma, I dreamt that I had created a successful TV detective series, the hero of which was called William Sonoma. I think it’s not a bad idea: he could solve a series of murders that had been committed with kitchen implements alone . . . But I digress.

I love Williams Sonoma. I love the French, country-style pasta dishes with paintings of vegetables; I love the rows of shiny toasters as big as baking ovens; I love the $2000 dollar collections of saucepan craters that I pine for, as I contemplate the three egg-cup sized ones I bought from IKEA.

I specially love the e-mails they send me that have such an air of exotic mystery, I am back at the store within the hour to conduct further investigations on the latest pointless invention they have written to me about.

Take the ”mandolin chipper”. Was it a mandolin-shaped contraption that chipped potatoes, or a machine that cut potatoes into the shape of baby mandolins? Or was it a machine for those odd occasions in life when you find yourself with an excess of mandolins in your closet and you say: “Oh, if only I had a mandolin chipper to reduce these down to trashable size”?

Whatever it was, I wanted that mandolin chipper. No: I had to have that mandolin chipper. Unfortunately, I never made it to the store to see it, as I had to take back the pressure cooker I had bought from World Market because it didn’t work, and the mandolin chippers went like hot . . . er, chipped potatoes.

Why I suddenly thought I needed a pressure cooker when I haven’t had one since I was a student in the late seventies, I don’t quite know, but they didn’t work then and they don’t work now.

By the time I made it back to base, my detective was no longer featuring mandolin chippers as the definitive buy of the week. That will teach me to be nostalgic.

Williams Sonoma hasn’t been too hot in the pumpkin assassination department, though, hence my going to Crate and Barrel – although I have to confess to being slightly tempted by WS’s No-Bake Halloween Haunted House: an edible house, complete with icing “glue” and candy decorations of bats and ghosts. Maybe I’ve already been living here too long.

I am not going quite so far as to organise my own Halloween party, although I might just knock on the door of the Addams Family with the skeleton garden shroud on the actual night.

Or I might just buy a pastry case, open a can of ready pureed, ready-cooked pumpkin, bake a pie and watch Halloween on the telly. Who needs a Pumpkin Carving Kit when you have a tin-opener.

My Role In The Jackson Five K 10/11/09

For ten minutes this week, I had more in common with La Toya Jackson than any other human being on the planet.

Waiting to board an Air New Zealand flight to Los Angeles, I was sitting in the Star Alliance lounge (more of that horror later), when an announcement came over the speaker: “Would passenger Stephen please come to the reception desk.”

Given the dreadful year I have so far had in every respect, I was expecting another bereavement, or at the very least a doctor standing by advising me not to travel, as I had less time to live than the flight took.

I was therefore shaking when I went up to the desk, where I was greeted by a lady speaking in hushed tones. “Miss Stephen?” “Yeeeeeees.” “We wondered whether you would be willing to change your seat on the airline.”

Now, whenever I travel, I am extremely particular about my seating arrangements. Eurostar: have to be travelling backwards, odd number in the aisle and near a toilet (73, 77, 11, 13), but not right next to the staff kitchen where they uproariously get the meals together (usually carriage 8).

Flying: next to the window, provided there is no one seated next to me, near an emergency exit, no upper levels, near a toilet (I have a very small bladder and drink at least three litres of water a day, hence the toilet obsession).

On Virgin Atlantic, I am less fussy, as I love their Upper Class lounge so much, I am so relaxed by boarding time, they could strap me to a wing and I wouldn’t care.

I have no idea about BA because I refuse to fly with them at the moment. I am still chasing a claim from 16 months ago, when they lost my luggage on a flight to Toulouse, and I had to re-schedule meetings, cancel the flight back, and take the Eurostar to Paris.

This week, they wrote to say they had credited me with £3.60 and thanked me profusely for choosing my "preferred airline". I will strap myself to a pigeon before I fly with them again.

But on Air New Zealand, I am quite particular about my seat. Their LA service (where they break before travelling on to Australia and New Zealand) is second to none. Terrific food, wonderful staff onboard, and although they don’t have a great lounge, they know how to look after people.

At the LA end, I have the amazing Lounge Concierge, Thierry. He sees me on and off the aircraft, gets me through Customs, and looks after me so well I think he now even beats the Virgin lounge in terms of my priorities.

The problem for ANZ is the Star Alliance lounge in the UK, which they share with what seems to be 100 other airlines. Awful food, screaming kids, bad lighting and, this week, no internet.

And then the request: would you give up your seat, because . . . even more hushed tones: “We have a celebrity on board who would like it.”

Oh, for God’s sake: who is it? La Toya Jackson.

United, at last: she wants 7K; I have it. But I melted. I have a soft spot for her, after her appearance on I’m a Celebrity last year, and it is clear what terrible pain she has been going through since her brother’s death.

So I said, okay: suddenly, 7K was gone. My seat. My special, special seat, quiet, away from the throng. I had surrendered it in a rare act of martyrdom to someone not who I thought deserved it more than I, but who I thought really needed the privacy more.

“Okay,” I said, “as it’s her.”

“If it was a Royal, I’d have TOLD you to,” I was informed.

Then I saw red. Quite frankly, if it had been a Royal, I would have told them where to go. And it’s a darn sight further down under than even New Zealand is.

My friends are mystified as to why I did it, but I was quick to point out that I expect an upgrade next time I travel, as reward for my sacrifice.

I had also requested that La Toya thank me in person – which she did. I suspect that if the poor lamb had realised she was going to have to show grateful thanks for the entire 11 hour journey, she would have stayed in 5K.

Anyway, at least it got me talking to her wonderful business manager Jeffre (lost the card, J – please get in touch!), and in La Toya I found a person of such extraordinary gentleness, sweetness and charm, I was even more won over by her than ever.

Mind you, if I’d had the chance to spend 11 hours in 7K, I’d have been Miss Sweetness and Light when I landed, too. Thierry, poor man, ended up seeing what 5K can do to a girl.

Remembering Blake 9/30/09

Six months ago tomorrow, I was boarding a flight to come to LA, where, following Blake Snyder’s scriptwriting course in March, I had been sufficiently inspired to pursue my writing career 6000 miles away from home.

Last night, I attended Blake’s memorial. He died suddenly on August 4th, and the outpouring of grief on his website, together with the grateful thanks from those whose lives he had changed, made his death an all-consuming experience.

I heard about his death on Facebook; his longest-standing friend, Tracey, who had known Blake since they were two, heard about it on Twitter. Social networking is the new bearer of both good and bad tidings, and it is also the 21st century means by which the dead live on.

The many tributes to Blake that appeared on an hourly basis on Facebook extended the grieving process; tortuous as it is, I continue to dip into them; it helps me to feel that he is still among us. His words, and the encouragement and support he gave to so many, is, to me, the way he lives on.

Blake’s friends organised a wonderful tribute that, despite the sadness of the occasion, was full of laughter and happy memories. Colleagues and friends shared their thoughts at the Writers Theater in LA, and despite the air of disbelief that still hangs over his death (I still felt that electric shock when Tracey said: “When Blake died . . . "), the evening felt not like an ending but a new beginning.

Blake believed in the power of transformation; it is what informed his own work and his teaching. In his brilliant screenwriting book, Save the Cat, he addresses the Finale of his 15 part structure as the place where “we wrap it up”; the place where “the lessons are applied . . . " The Final Image, he says, “is your proof that change has occurred and that it’s real.”

When I left London six months ago, I was very unhappy. For financial reasons, I had been forced to leave Paris, where I had enjoyed a very happy eight years, and I was miserable being back in the city I have never liked since I first moved there 25 years ago.

I had hit 50, many friends were sick or had already died, and the recession was biting hard in the media industry, as it was (and still is) elsewhere.

Blake’s passion, energy, and support of my writing got me to LA, and in the short time I knew him I felt ensconced in his bubble; that’s the only way I can put it. I drank in every word he said, both professionally and personally, and began to regain much of the confidence I had lost in the UK.

Blake and I talked or e-mailed all the time, and when we met for lunch shortly before he died, we talked about where the “act three” of my story – the autobiographical one that is the subject of the book I am writing – might be heading.

I was expressing fear; Blake, in his eternal optimism, expressed excitement that I didn’t know. Who could have predicted this cruel twist in the narrative that, ironically, has led me into my act three, alone.

Blake spoke often of the mentor figure who, in screenplays, sometimes dies at the end of act two, the point at which the hero decides whether he or she puts the lessons learned into practice, or reverts to the place they were in before.

Over the past six months, I have learned many lessons: about people, writing, and myself. My mentor has gone, but his teachings live on, and fearful (even more so) as I am about where act three might be going, this is undoubtedly the start of it.

I feel that Blake came into my life for a reason: right time, right place. I am blessed to have known him and to have shared in his wisdom.

At the memorial, one of his writing partners, Sheldon Bull, said that we should ask ourselves whether, when we died, people would share in such an evening as we were doing for Blake. If not, he said, we were not living, and we should get out there and make some mistakes.

I don’t know what my act three holds, but of one thing I can be certain: there will be many more mistakes; and they, just like the things I learned from Blake, will be valuable lessons, too.

Nobody’s life is perfect, but despite the sadnesses, there is still enough good to make it worthwhile, and it is by our mistakes that we grow.

April 1st 2009. The day I came to LA. October 1st 2009. A new beginning, Blake. As you say in Chapter two: “The same thing . . . only different!” - thanks to you. Good-night, sweet prince.